April 20, 2016

Extreme Metal and the Moon: a guest post by Ty Arthur, author of "Empty"

There are terrors still waiting to be discovered in the vast emptiness of space. After millennia of travel through the void, man has convinced himself he is master of the stars. Down-on-his-luck, stuck performing punishment duty in the lower levels of the Penrose, Junior Engineer 3rd Class Hansen wants nothing more than to see the wreckage of a newly discovered ship dating back to man's earliest deep space explorations. The engineer is about to get his wish, and in the process come face-to-face with a long-dormant horror waiting patiently for the perfect vessel. What he'll uncover in the darkness will threaten to consume him, body and soul.

When I first started
writing fiction, I spent a lot of time wondering how the creative
process worked for the genre greats. What inspired Barker's unique
vision in “The Hellbound Heart?” What experiences spurred on the
fantasy-meets-terror of “Weaveworld?” Where did that wellspring
of ideas for the weird cosmic horror of Machen and Lovecraft truly
come from?

I suspect the answer
would change drastically from author to author, and what's true for
one would be false for another. A personal answer to that question
eluded me as I tried, and failed, to draw the attention of a
publisher for any of my work.

It wasn't until
something outside my control well and truly rocked my whole world
that I was able to find my voice. I can honestly say I've never known
the same euphoric high as the first time we discovered my wife was
pregnant. I discovered an equally new despairing low when our child
died in the womb, with both of us utterly powerless to do anything
about it.

As part of the grieving
process, I wrote a story meant to make the reader feel as awful as I
did, and to express a rage that had no healthy outlet in the real
world. No one was ever particularly meant to read it, and I had no
expectations of it ever seeing print. Nearly ready to give up after
all the rejections, I sent that short fantasy/horror tale out on a
whim.

That was the first
story I ever submitted that publishers were actually excited about.
It's a lesson I took to heart.

Everything I write now
starts with a kernel of a personal experience, and my new
sci-fi/horror book “Empty” is no exception. For the basis of this
story I went way back to my youth and drew on the experience of being
the only non-religious kid at a religious summer camp (which was
interesting and eventful, to say the least).

The initial idea was to
create a feeling of sleepless paranoia, where there's something
inside the main character that could cause problems if discovered by
those around him. Intending to go a more literal route, “Empty”
started as a story about a kid at a camp who has been cursed with
lycanthropy, and has to find some way to keep his transformation
secret.

Beyond the diverging
methods of authors finding inspiration for new stories, it's
fascinating to me how many different ways a single idea or basic
framework for a book can be expressed. While writing that original
version of “Empty,” the words just weren't flowing particularly
well, and I wasn't satisfied with anything that was hitting the page.

Rather than continuing,
I decided to spend some time thinking about the overall ideas behind
the story, and I kept getting drawn again and again to celestial
bodies like the moon – a major component of any werewolf story.
That's when it all seemed to click, and something about all that vast
empty space in an uncaring universe (where man is far less
significant than he thinks he is) suddenly seemed like the perfect
setting for this story.

I'd never written
anything in the sci-fi genre before, but it's really an amazing match
for anything horrific. The classic “Aliens” is not, strictly
speaking, a horror film, but has there ever been a better
sci-fi/horror mashup on the big screen? “The Thing” and “Event
Horizon,” while both taking their fair share of knocks from the
reviewers, are still two amazing examples of Lovecraftian horror
expressed in drastically different ways through the sci-fi medium.

With the setting picked
and the characters and environments coming together, there was only
one piece of the puzzle left - the mood. For that, I turned to my
second passion: music. Extreme metal was a cathartic outlet for me as
a kid, and it's remained so as an adult and even turned into a
profession as I found myself freelancing for heavy metal sites.

A constant stream of
the most discordant and avant-garde sounds fueled the writing
sessions, along with some interludes into melodic and spacey
territory for introspective moments (for those who are interested, a
full listening playlist and my thoughts on why the music matches the
book can be found here.

It's been a long and
winding trek to finally seeing “Empty” completed and now released
through Mirror Matter Press, and based on the feedback so far, the
journey was well worth the effort. Hopefully those of you who take
the time to give it a read will agree, and if I've done my job right,
you'll find yourself more than a little disturbed by engineer
Hansen's experiences being separated from the herd onboard the
Penrose and the Thorne.

“Empty” is
available digitally and physically through Amazon and
I'm already well into working on the next book, which delves even
deeper into the most disturbing reaches of the human condition. Can't
wait to meet you all there!- Ty Arthur